Not Quite Traditional Rugs

We here at BeWeave it LOVE it when weavers take traditional techniques and motifs and turn them into something completely new and fabulous. Right now we’re completely obsessed with Azerbaijani weaver Faig Ahmed and his not-quite-traditional carpets.

In his weaving, Ahmed takes traditional designs and skews them by blurring the image, pixelating it, stretching it, and so much more. Many of his works look like photographs of carpets that have been manipulated in Photoshop, but now, they are truly textiles and they are truly incredible.

In other cases he adds images to the carpets that don’t quite fit. For example, in his carpet “Rabbit” he wove a happy pink cartoon bunny peaking around the corner and in “Unknown” the middle of the carpet features a bit of handwoven graffiti. (You can see an online gallery of some of his carpetshere. They will blow your mind.)

Currently with his workThread Installation, Ahmed is experimenting with raveling carpets and creating new art from the yarn. He takes traditional Azerbaijani rugs, ravels them, and uses the threads to create elaborate designs on the wall that mimic traditional handwoven designs. The threads cross the room and land on the wall, where they are transformed into partial flowers and snowflakes. The installation looks simultaneously like the designs are being destroyed and created simultaneously. According to Ahmed, "I’ve been always fond of investigating and researching every detail of anything that had interested me and sometimes this researches reached inconceivable depths mixing up with my imagination. I’m heretofore harried by a question others have left in childhood–“what is inside?”